Chemistry in your food
FOOD PRESERVATION Before you continue reading, have a look at your kitchen and refrigerator! Have you noticed that there are so much canned food and food kept in plastic bags or bottles? Have you wondered why food such as fruit jam, sausages, spagheti, can kept for so long but still taste fresh and delicious? This is all because of FOOD PRESERVATION History of food preservation History of food preservation when food preservation technology was not as advance as today, the evolving human race had eaten food raw and uncooked for hundreds of thousands of years! The first cooked food is roasted using fire, in Africa, 1,400,000 B.C.! After the discovery of fire to cook food, many variations to process food are invented too, one of them is FOOD PRESERVATION. There is evidence that as early as 12,000 B.C., Egyptian tribes people on the lower Nile dried fish and poultry using the hot desert sun. Areas with similar hot and dry climates found drying to be an effective method of preservation.This is the first method human used to preserve food, but there are actually many more ways of food preservation. Methods of Food Preservation 1) Flash Freezing: Used in the food industry to quickly freeze perishable food items. In this case, food items are subjected to temperatures well below water's melting/freezing point (273.15K or 0°C), inhibit the growth of bacteria. For example, meat. 2)Salting/Curing: Table salt, which consists primarily of sodium chloride, kills and inhibits the growth of microorganisms by drawing water out of the cells of both microbe and food alike through osmosis. For example, kimchi. 3)Lye: Sodium hydroxide (lye) makes food too alkaline for bacterial growth. Lye will saponify fats in the food, which will change its flavor and texture. For example, century egg. There are still many types of preservation method, but I am going to focus on the most common type of preservation method used in food processing industry, that is by adding chemical food preservatives into food product. The most popular and commonly used preservatives are BHA and BHT. Are these food preservatives safe to consume? -Present researches shows that the concentration of BHA and BHT used in food are most probably harmless. -HOWEVER, after high dosage and long-term consume, there is evidence that certain persons may have difficulty metabolizing BHA and BHT, resulting in health and behavior changes. For example, hyperactivity in children. -Experiments show that BHA may induces in animals tumours of the forestomach, which are dose dependent, whereas BHT induces liver tumours in long-term experiments. Because there is no indication of genotoxicity of BHA and BHT, all published findings agree with the fact that BHA and BHT are tumour promoters. Food is undeniably the most important factor to achieve good health. After reading so much about food preservatives and how it works, I bet you know what is the better way to consume food! Too much canned or processed food can lead harmful effects to our body, we should consume the food we need in the most natural and healthy way, for example, pluck from the trees! The Secret of Food Colouring What makes those canned peas so green? Chlorophyll, you say? Nope! It’s actually Green No. 3, one of the modern world’s most plentiful food colorings. COLOURlovers gives the history of this and six other colorings, and it’s a fascinating peek into what we consume every day without knowing it. I was surprised to learn how many popular colors are made, in part, from coal tar — a substance that causes cancer in rats. Some of these colors have actually been banned by countries in the European Union. I was also reminded of the urban legend surrounding Mountain Dew, which derives its unnatural hue from Yellow No. 5: no, it doesn’t shrink men’s testicles and wither their sperm, but some researchers have linked it to childhood attention disorders.